While dismayed Americans watched the “zero tolerance” policy of family separation unfolding at the Mexican border, across the Atlantic, another shocking migration crisis continues to fester. Behind the grueling headlines of drownings in the Mediterranean Sea, migrants run a gauntlet of abuse through the Sahara desert to reach the Libyan coast. Armed militias and terrorist organizations across the Sahel profit by smuggling people displaced by climate, population, and security crises. While European policymakers struggle to cope with arrivals, their containment approach consistently disregards the root causes that force people to take such unimaginable risks. The high value of these human commodities not only exposes vulnerable migrants to torture, extortion, and even enslavement, but also provides funds for terrorist groups intent on attacking the West.

A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences says that melting in Greenland could change ocean currents and cause unprecedented drought in Africa’s Sahel region, the Washington Post reported last week: “The consequence could be devastating agricultural losses as the area’s climate shifts. And in the most severe scenarios, tens of millions of people could be forced to migrate from the area.”

The Sahel region of Africa is a wide band that marks the transition from the Sahara Desert in the north to the wetter, sub-tropical regions in the south. The Sahelian countries have some of the most rapidly growing populations in the world and have faced significant environmental change over the past century. In recent years, insurgencies have surged in several countries, new terrorist groups have become active, there have been several droughts, and migration has increased.

The epicenter of violence in the unstable country of Mali has historically been in the north, a contested region from where Touareg separatist and jihadist armed groups launched an insurgency against the state in 2012. But over the last two years, there has been a marked shift in communal and anti-state violence to the central region, and climate change may have played a role.

Does global water stress matter for U.S. national security, and if so, how? That’s a major focus of the next CNA Military Advisory Board report, says Julia McQuaid of the CNA Corporation in this week’s podcast. She talks about the preliminary findings of the report and how the national security community views water.

In November 2015, experts from a variety of fields gathered at the Peace Palace in The Hague for the Planetary Security Conference, one of the first large-scale conferences on environmental security and what is hoped to be the start of an annual series. The conference report gives a sense of the diverse discussions held in the Netherlands.

This fall, the National Intelligence Council released an intelligence community assessment of the extent to which factors such as climate change, severe weather, conflict, resource scarcity, disease, poor governance, and environmental degradation will impact peoples’ purchasing power and food availability over the next decade. They found “the overall risk of food insecurity in many countries of strategic importance to the United States will increase.”